Wednesday, 19 April 2017

Burda of the month: 2/2017 #108 cropped jacket

I've been very slow in starting my Burda challenge this year - here we are in the middle of April already and I haven't posted a single project yet. But I recently finished a project from the January issue, today started on a project from the March issue and am now posting my February project so I'm catching up.

Since I am about 90% finished making a black and white boucle jacket with trim I decided not to use boucle fabric or any trim. Instead, I used a woven black and white fabric that I bought from The Fabric Store a few months ago, and placed the front placket and shoulder bands on a different grain in place of using any trim.

Burda wasn't joking when they describe this as a cropped jacket. I am long waisted and tend to add a few centimetres/an inch to the bottom of my bodices when using Burda but I completely forgot to do with this jacket. Even with the tiniest of hems this jacket finishes at my waist. It's also quite boxy, which makes the back in particular swing out which you can see in the photo below:

I was tempted to take in the jacket along the front and back princess seams and the centre back seam to get a close fit, but I think the boxy look suits the cropped length better so I just left it loose fitting. Even though it looks a bit sloppy in the photo below, in real life I think it looks ok (and I can't see the back anyway):

But there's always something that we don't quite like about our projects isn't there? I'm a bit annoyed at myself for the zipper treatment at the front - I couldn't find a zipper that was quite long enough, and instead of searching a few more stores I decided to make it work by leaving a few centimetres at the top and the bottom of zip as a 'design feature'. Well, I don't think it works and it looks terrible especially at the top. So when I do track down the right length zip I will take it out and replace it because this looks really homemade in the worst possible way:

So, apart from that zipper I really like this jacket. It is an easy pattern to sew, although my fabric has a slight bit of stretch and tended to shift around a bit which made it difficult to align those stripes. I ended up dong a bit of hand stitching to keep them matched which helped to line them up even across the front princess seam. The one benefit of being flat chested is that the princess seam curve is rather gentle which makes it possible to match those stripes!

When I wore this to work last week I received so many compliments so clearly it's a winner. I recommend if you're planning to make this jacket to check the finished length to make sure it's right for you because it surely is short. Luckily this length works with this high waisted pencil skirt I'm wearing, because I really dislike having a small bit of top poking out at the waistline.

And now to get my March project finished before the April issue arrives in my letterbox, fingers crossed I can catch up before it's too late and the year gets away from me.